Imagine a mountain suddenly cleft asunder, disclosing a frightful abyss several hundred feet in depth, lined with gray rocks that rise almost perpendicularly to the very clouds, and, far down at the bottom, a narrow stream winding sullenly along, looking like one of the fabled rivers of the _abisso doloroso_ of the great Florentine. Half way up one side of this _Vallée Ténébreuse_, as it was once called, hangs the village of Roc Amadour like a cluster of birds’ nests along the edge of a precipice, over which are suspended several churches, one above the other, that seem hewn out of the very cliff. These are the famous sanctuaries of Roc Amadour that have been frequented from time immemorial. Several hundred feet above these churches, on the very summit of the mount, is the old castle of La Charette, with its ramparts overlooking the whole country. This served in the frequent wars of the middle ages not only for the defence of the sanctuary below, but of the town of Roc Amadour, which was then a post of strategic importance, and has its page in history, as every reader of Sir John Froissart knows. The sight of this mountain, that looks as if rent asunder by some awful convulsion of nature, with the castle on its summit; its rocky sides once peopled with hermits, and still alive with the voice of prayer; the churches that swell out of the cliff like the bastions of a fortress; the village on the ledge below; and the dizzy ravine in the depths, is truly astonishing. The town looks as if the breath of modern progress had never reached it. It is the only place in all Europe where we did not meet an Englishman or an American. One would think the bivalve in which it is lodged just opened after being closed hundreds of years. There is the Rue de la Couronnerie, where Henry Court-Mantel was crowned King of Aquitaine. There are the remains of the house occupied by his father, Henry II. of England, with the huge well he caused to be dug, from which the inhabitants still draw water. And there are the remains of the four fortified gates ruined in the wars of the sixteenth century.